I went to an interesting show a few weeks back at the Cooper-Hewitt, National Design Museum, a division of the Smithsonian Institution. Design for a Living World has been mounted with the Nature Conservancy. It’s an in-depth look at how a number of designers are putting sustainable materials to excellent use in products like wool rug tiles and packaging made from cocoa. At the website, there are slide shows, illuminating text, and video interviews with the designers, Isaac Mizrahi and Maya Lin among them.
A couple of years back, they had another terrific exhibition: Design for the Other 90%. This show looked at innovative, low-tech design breakthroughs in energy, transport, shelter, health, water and education.
If you’re in New York between now and January 4, get over to the Cooper-Hewitt (no relation) to see the show.
As you know, there has been a tremendous amount of activity on climate change and energy on The Hill over the past year. The House of Representatives got going fast, even before the 111th Congress got underway. A leading progressive, hardball-playing Congressman from Los Angeles, Henry Waxman, assumed the chairmanship of the critical Energy and Commerce in a palace coup. He created a new subcommittee, Energy and the Environment, and installed an outspoken Massachusetts progressive, Ed Markey, as the chair. In late June, after a fair bit of horse trading among key legislators - plus some old-fashioned threats, cajolery and pleading from Speaker Pelosi and her team, and, it’s fair to assume, President Obama and his team - the landmark American Clean Energy and Security Act (H.R. 2454), aka Waxman-Markey, was passed in the House. The vote was close, 219-212, but historic nonetheless. There are extraordinary complexities to the politics, the psychology, and the economics. Nevertheless, Waxman-Markey has become the touchstone for legislative action.
Next stop the Senate. The Senate leadership, no doubt in full consultation with the House leadership and the White House, decided to put climate change and energy behind health as the focus for the summer and fall. At the end of September, two forward-thinking, aggressive legislators, both renewable energy and environmental protection hawks, John Kerry, chair of the Foreign Relations Committee, and Barbara Boxer, committee chair for Environment and Public Works, started to turn up the tempo on climate change and energy. They introduced the Clean Energy Jobs and American Power Act. Boxer’s committee will hold three days of hearings this week, and mark-up on the bill is slated to commence the first week of November.
In her announcement of the release of the first full working draft of the bill, Boxer noted that a new EPA analysis showed no discernible difference between Kerry-Boxer and Waxman-Markey in their economic impact on the average American household: $80 to $111 per year.
This climate change/energy initiative, so critical to the health and well being of the United States - much more so, I would not hesitate to venture, than health care reform - will likely not, according to all reports, make it into law this year, let alone before Copenhagen, but there’s a pretty solid foundation being laid for it for enactment in the second session of this Congress.
The folks at the White House, with President Obama very much driving them, are working assiduously on a number of fronts to make this legislation happen. This article from the AP delves into how this is being manifested. A large and growing group of top advisors now meet regularly on Obama’s green agenda. There has been considerable outreach to mayors, governors, and members of Congress. Carol Browner, the top White House official on climate and energy said: “It’s really engaging a wide array of people across the administration to make sure that we’re answering the questions that the Senate needs answered and working with individual members as they think about how they can support comprehensive energy legislation. It’s just grown and grown and grown, with more and more Cabinet agencies and secretaries wanting to be involved.”
I’ve noted at the blog not only the Obama Administration’s selection of truly impressive environmental and energy leaders to top posts, but its emphasis on green stimulus and jobs, and the fact that it has been consistently pushing the edge of the envelope on regulatory initiatives. (See recent posts here and here, for instance.)
The President made a major speech at MIT last week “challenging Americans to lead the global economy in clean energy.” You can see the speech below.
We are, without a shadow of a doubt, making enormous progress in the US, politically and in the business community, on making the transition to clean, smart, economically stable, and conflict-free energy. More and more people every day in high places, and across the board - witness the burst of concern and action this past weekend - are getting it. Making peace with the planet, restoring the earth to balance, call it what you like: It’s happening here.
In the spirit of Step It Up 2007 and Earth Hour, 350.org reports that yesterday’s International Day of Climate Action brought people together in 181 countries, at over 5,200 events, for the “most widespread day of environmental action in the planet’s history.” See a great slide show plus videos and other reports here on this successful expression of the depth and breadth of people’s concern.
Don’t think this is an international effort? There are over a dozen languages including Spanish, French, Russian, Arabic and Chinese in which you can read about the fun people had yesterday and learn more about how to confront the climate crisis.
See Bill McKibben, the author and 350 organizer, via GristTV, on what this meant and means.
The venerable Matt Wald at the “NY Times” had a revealing story yesterday: Fossil Fuels’ Hidden Cost Is in Billions, Study Says. He cites a study, commissioned by Congress, just out from the National Research Council. Monetizing the value of human life cut short by air pollution - “small soot particles, which cause lung damage; nitrogen oxides, which contribute to smog; and sulfur dioxide, which causes acid rain” - the NRC estimated $120 billion a year in health costs, based on 20,000 premature deaths valued at $6 million each.
The study did not measure the impacts from trains, shipping, or aviation, nor from the impacts of climate change. The NRC study neglects then, among other things, what James J. Corbett, a professor in the College of Earth, Ocean and Engineering at the University of Delaware, asserted in a study published two years ago that attributed 60,000 cardiopulmonary and lung cancer deaths each year globally to shipping emissions - and forecast an increase to nearly 85,000 deaths by 2012 under current trends.
The NRC study “…also found that renewable motor fuel, in the form of ethanol from corn, was slightly worse than gasoline in its environmental impact.” (See Are Biofuels A Bummer? for more on the problems of ethanol production.) The NRC study did not, however, delve into environmental or health damage from coal mining, oil extraction and refining, nor nuclear power operations and radioactive waste disposal. (For more at the blog on coal, see Coal - Besides Carbon Dioxide, There’s …)
I’ve highlighted many other problems with fossil fuel and nuclear power here, including the massive capital and operating costs and the extraordinary inefficiency of conversion loss in conventional central power generation. I’ve touched on the “resource curse” too. What I and others have been saying is let’s all of us, in the developed and the developing world, be free of these many and diverse drags on our societies. What the National Research Council is affirming in their study is that health impacts count!
(There’s a P.S. here: the study found that the health impacts from natural gas are quite small relative to those from coal and oil. Not surprisingly, there’s a nearly full-page ad from America’s Natural Gas Alliance (ANGA) tucked in right next to Wald’s article.)
Someone in my class at Pace University in NYC a couple of years ago mentioned that she thought that earthquakes and other similar phenomenon were being influenced by climate change. I pooh-poohed the idea, saying that climate change was responsible for a lot of ills - with more to come - but that it couldn’t impact things happening at the level of the earth’s geology, such as undersea earthquakes that generate tsunamis. Sounds pretty solid, right? Like the earth. Well, it appears that I was wrong. (First time for everything.)
I came across this article from Reuters last month. “Climate change doesn’t just affect the atmosphere and the oceans but the earth’s crust as well. The whole earth is an interactive system.” That’s how Professor Bill McGuire of University College London characterized things.
UCL hosted a conference, Climate Forcing of Geological and Geomorphological Hazards, supported by the UK Met Office, the British Geological Survey, the British Antarctic Survey and Oxford university. There were scores of researchers present, with sessions on climates of the past and future, climate forcing of volcanism and volcanic activity, and climate as a driver of seismic, mass movement and tsunami hazards.
Add these to the growing list of potentially devastating impacts from climate change. And, when something seems absurd or, at best, implausible, as it concerns the possibilities for climate catastrophe, dig a little deeper to see if maybe there isn’t something really there. Or perhaps, as Joe Heller put it, “Just because you’re paranoid doesn’t mean they aren’t after you.”
Last week I dropped in, along with bloggers in 155 countries across six continents, for Blog Action Day ‘09: Climate Change. CNN covered the story and the organizers report that 13,484 blogs reached 18,076,782 readers.
A big part of the reason for this effort was to further enlighten folks around the world about this coming Saturday’s Global Day of Action organized by 350.org. There are thousands of activities, nearly everywhere.
I’ve been irremediably optimistic about renewables for some time. Here are just a few more reasons why:
Army to Build Out 500 MW of Solar in the Mojave - I recently pointed out where the world’s solar hotspots are. No surprise to find the Mojave is among them. So, as Reuters reports here, the US Army is going to build a combined PV and CSP facility, working with Acciona. This is in line with the federal government’s recent mandate to radically lower GHG emissions at its facilities. DOD is on it.
Revolutionary Synergy of Solar and Cell Phones - In an interesting take, Reuters asks the musical question: Will solar speed up emerging cell phone revolution?I mentioned some comments from Carl-Henrik Svanberg, CEO of Ericsson, here a while back, to the effect that mobile telephony was the “singlemost transformative technology in the developing world.” The article puts it this way: for “…millions of people in Africa and Asia, with no connection to electricity grids or unreliable and expensive power access, these little solar-powered gadgets are proving to be revolutionary.” Indian telecom VNL’s founder and CEO, Rajiv Mehrotra, says “If you look at the map of countries with low tele-density — there is plenty of sunshine everywhere.” See this video of an interview with Mehrotra from ITU Telecom TV.
Why are cell phones so good for developing world users: for one thing, the ability for producers of goods, from small farmers and craftsmen to cooperatives, to much more easily ascertain “…price transparency and more accurate and timely information.”
Siemens Buys Into Solar - One of the biggest industrial concerns in the world - and one with an enormous environmental portfolio - Siemens, is putting up half a billion dollars “…to strengthen its position in the concentrating solar thermal power (CSP) market…” by buying Solel. Here’s the story from RenewableEnergyWorld.com. I noted here in July that Siemens was one of several major companies boosting the exciting Desertec project for CSP in North Africa and the Middle East.
“The market for solar thermal energy is highly promising, and vigorous growth is expected to continue for Solel,” says René Umlauft, CEO of Siemen’s Renewable Division, in the article. Don’t think solar is booming? Think again.
There’s a great front-page article at the “NY Times” today about how three trillion cubic feet of methane leak into the air every year, much of it from oil and gas operations, and how some companies are attempting to stem the tide of leaks. The article says “This amount has the warming power of emissions from over half the coal plants in the United States.”
The article describes how one big company, EnCana, is trying to capture the gas which is “…also a cheap, effective way of blunting climate change that could potentially be replicated thousands of times over, from Wyoming to Siberia, energy experts say.” P.S. EnCana doesn’t lose revenue-enhancing natural gas to the atmosphere. Once again, common-sense approaches so often have tremendous bang for the buck. As 3M has said (and demonstrated) for many years: Pollution Prevention Pays.
Meanwhile, there’s another hugely wasteful standard practice in the oil and gas industry that intensifies GHG loading: gas flaring. I’ve written about this here at the blog. (This was in the context of Mexico’s attempts to reduce its footprint.) Altogether, gas flaring has a global impact on climate change by adding about 400 million tons of CO2 annually.
Every day is action day on climate change for this blog, but the good folks at Change.org and The Alliance for Climate Protection are sponsoring an international event today, Blog Action Day, that hopes to unite the blogosphere to discuss, promote and move folks to action to help avert climate catastrophe. (Clean and renewable energy, sane consumption patterns, vastly improved public and environmental health, and sustainable development, among other “co-benefits,” all come along - no extra charge - with action on climate change.)
You can find here a list of targeted actions to take. If none of these work for you, go to any number of Climate Change Resources I’ve got listed at the blog to see how to put your shoulder to the wheel. If you do nothing else, power up your knowledge here at Climate Change, or at any of the sites I’ve got listed, or scores of others.
Beyond today, 350.org is building momentum for its October 24th Global Day of Action. See this video - and get moving. Your planet needs your TLC.
